Page 20 of Shadowed

"I want to see them settled. Before I go."

"No." The word is final. Not cruel—structural. "You will see them after your first assignment. Incentive must have a timeline."

I could fight this. I want to fight this. But the arithmetic is the arithmetic, and the arithmetic says he holds every card and Ihold a piece of paper with terms he was always going to honour and the only real leverage I have is the thing he just told me—that I am interesting. That watching me work has value.

It's not much. It's more than I had yesterday.

"Tonight," I say. "After dark."

"After dark."

He leaves. The shadows leave. The flat goes back to being a flat—small, cold, smelling of candle wax and sleeping children and the faint ghost of dark stone that clings to the air like perfume.

I sit on the floor and look at my four pages of beautifully negotiated terms. I do not cry. Crying is expensive and I cannot afford it. My hands are full of paper. My head is full of arithmetic. My body is full of something hot and wrong that pulses in time with my heartbeat and will not, no matter how hard I try, stop.

9

CALIGO

She arrives at the passage point carrying one bag.

I expected more. Most humans bring their lives with them—trinkets, keepsakes, the accumulated debris of sentimental attachment. She has one canvas bag, the kind dockhands use, slung across her body. It contains, based on its weight and the way it sits against her hip: clothes, her pick set, a knife, and something heavy wrapped in cloth that I can't identify.

"That's all," she says, reading the question I didn't ask.

"I wasn't going to comment."

"You were thinking it. Your shadows did something."

She's right. My shadows shifted when she appeared—a settling, a leaning, the way they always lean toward her now, as if she's magnetic north and they are iron filings with no loyalty to me whatsoever. I've stopped trying to control it. Controlling it costs more energy than the dying court can spare, and the result is the same—they lean, they reach, they flatten themselves against whatever surface puts them closest to her.

"The passage is through here." I gesture toward the alley wall. Brick, soot-stained, unremarkable. The kind of wallAshworth builds and forgets about. "Put your hand on the stone."

She doesn't. She looks at the wall, then at me, then at the wall again. Calculating. The thief's assessment runs behind her eyes—material, construction, structural integrity, exits.

"It's a wall."

"It's a door."

"It's a wall that looks like a wall and feels like a wall and—" She puts her hand on the brick and stops talking. Her fingers spread against the stone and her face changes—not fear, not surprise, but the expression of someone who has just picked up a tool and found it lighter than expected. "Oh."

"Yes."

"It's warm."

"The passage exists between the courts and the human world. The boundary has its own temperature."

"That's not what I meant." Her hand presses flat. Her eyes close for half a second and when they open there's something in them I haven't seen before—recognition. Not of me. Of the wall. Of the passage. Of the dark that lives between the stones. "It feels like?—"

She pulls her hand back. Fast, like she's touched a hot stove.

"Never mind what it feels like. How does it work?"

I hold out my hand. Palm up. The gesture isn't ceremonial—the passage requires physical contact with a court-blooded Fae to open for a human. She could put her hand in mine or grip my wrist or take my elbow. Any contact will work.

She looks at my hand the way she looked at the wall. Calculating.

"I need to touch you."